1. Broadband is seriously ubiquitous, at least where it matters
2. TV shows in Europe are boring
3. People are inherently more lazy, this would mean most users are passive
4. IPTV companies/providers have done a better job marketing the medium
5. Internet activity is increasing for all Web segments in Europe. This could be attributed to 1.
The economics behind this statistic could be debatable. It could be one of many reasons, but there is reason to believe that, that 'reason' could be good enough to consider marketing aggressively in Europe.
Based on these possible inferences, how do you think one should market their Web 2.0 company in Europe? Or should the product/service be such that it doesn't require any special marketing effort in Europe?
Any thoughts on this one?
Here in germany we see a lot of clones of successful concepts from the US. Today I saw an ad for a new phone which comes bundled with something called wubbler (or something like that, can't remember). I bet that's a Twitter clone...
If you are aiming for a truly pan-european market, that's... let's see: English, Portuguese, Spanish, maybe Catalan if you're picky, French, German, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finish, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Romanian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Estonian, Russian, Maltese(sp?), etc... etc...
That adds up really quickly. Also, if you are aiming for a comunity, breaking each little bit off into its own language group might make it take longer to attain critical mass. Also, most young people speak at least some English everywhere.
On the other hand, you're never going to be the player in a market if you don't do the language - oknotizie.alice.it came along far after the likes of reddit and digg, and is basically becoming the site for Italy.
Even limiting yourself to "important" languages, you have English, French, German followed by Italian and Spanish, which is a lot to chew on if you have lots of text to translate and keep up to date.
There must be some reason that in most of the countries you listed, millions of people still use crappy 10MB e-mail services and social networking sites that are local to the country, and got the cultural factor right. Gmail and Yahoo all try to localize, but most people I know who use them are just annoyed by the translations, and quickly switch back to English.
What I would like is if US companies would hire a Norwegian lawyer to write the Terms of Service. It's pointless to agree to some terms that have no base in Norwegian law.
You could also try to support a more free form registration form. Not all countries use the same types of zip-code and phone number...
And support UTF-8 (or at least ISO-8859-1). Most European languages use characters not found in the English alphabet (Norway has an additional three characters: Æ, Ø and Å, let's see if this form supports them. Should be displayed as Æ, Ø and Å)
If this page were meant for Europe, it would fail. When you are building a social site it is important that people can use their own language.